[R] listing all functions in R

Philippe Grosjean phgrosjean at sciviews.org
Mon Jan 15 18:56:00 CET 2007 

Hello,

First, regarding GeSHi syntax highlighting for R, I have done one for
the R Wiki (plus the R function that generates the list of keywords
automatically). I will attach it to a second email send privately to
you, since the mailing list do not accept attachments.

For the problem of keeping web pages up-to-date with R code, I am also
considering this problem with the R Wiki. Although I still do not have a
completely working solution, the approach is similar to Sweave. I have a
function which extracts the R code from wiki pages (that is, it
'Stangles' the wiki page, in the Sweave terminology). I can get, thus,
the R code from all wiki pages in turn, test them and write a report
with a couple of R code lines. Here is are my functions:

getWikiRcode <- function(wikipage, url = "http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki",
	strip.empty.lines = TRUE, strip.output = FALSE) {
	# Read the raw wiki page
	Url <- paste(url, "/doku.php?id=", wikipage, "&do=export_raw", sep ="")
	Raw <- readLines(Url)
	
	# Get only <code r> .... </code> chunks from this page
	Codestart <- grep("^\\s*<code", Raw)
	Codeend <- grep("^\\s*</code>", Raw)
	# A little bit of checking first
	if (length(Codestart) != length(Codeend) || any(Codeend <= Codestart))
		stop("Malformed wiki page (wrong <code>... </code> sections)")	
	# Get only r code sections (those starting with <code r> from the list
	Rstart <- grep("^\\s*<code r>", Raw)
	if (length(Rstart) == 0) return(character(0))	# no R code in this page
	isRsection <- Codestart %in% Rstart
	Rend <- Codeend[isRsection]
	
	# Construct the list of text lines related to r code
	R <- data.frame(Start = Rstart, End = Rend)
	Seq <- function(x) seq(from = x[1], to = x[2])
	Rrows <- c(apply(R, 1, Seq), recursive = TRUE)
	Rcode <- Raw[Rrows]
	
	# Eliminate <code r> and </code> tags
	Rcode <- gsub("^\\s*</?code( r)?>.*$", "", Rcode)
	
	# Eliminate prompt from R code '> ', or '+ ' at the begining of a line
	Rcode <- sub("^[>+] ", "", Rcode)
	
	# Possibly eliminate empty lines
	if (strip.empty.lines) Rcode <- Rcode[Rcode != ""]
	
	# Possibly eliminate output (lines starting with '#!')
	if (strip.output) {
		Routput <- grep("^\\#\\!", Rcode)
		if (length(Routput) > 0) Rcode <- Rcode[-Routput]
	}
	
	# Return the R code
	return(Rcode)
}

rcode <- getWikiRcode("tips:data-frames:merge")
rcode

sourceWikiRcode <- function(wikipage, echo = TRUE, url =
"http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki",
	strip.empty.lines = TRUE, strip.output = FALSE, ...) {
	# Call getWikiRcode() to extract r code from wiki pages
	Rcode <- getWikiRcode(wikipage = wikipage, url = url,
		strip.empty.lines = strip.empty.lines, strip.output = strip.output)
	if (length(Rcode) == 0) {
		warning("No r code in this page!")
	} else {
		Con <- textConnection(Rcode)
		source(Con, echo = echo, ...)
		close(Con)
	}
}

sourceWikiRcode("tips:data-frames:merge")
# Here, the last part of this page is not directly executable (data1 is
not defined)
# but the rest is fine!

This is suboptimal, and I am considering rewriting it in PHP to return R
code only from the wiki server.

Best,

Philippe Grosjean

Gavin Simpson wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-01-06 at 10:58 -0500, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>> The arguments to the functions can differ too even if they
>> exist on multiple platforms.   system() on Windows has the
>> input= argument but not on UNIX.
> 
> That's a good point Gabor, and one I hadn't considered as yet. As I'm
> only just setting out on the road to providing R help resources for the
> wider world (rather than the limited environs of the courses I have
> run), I tend to not have thought about these things much - though I
> guess I have a few gotchas waiting to bite me in the ass before too
> long.
> 
> I am just starting to think about the best way to organise the snippets
> of code to allow me to keep them up-to-date with current R and changes
> in package code that the snippets use. Dropping the code verbatim into
> PHP scripts isn't a good idea. At the moment I intend to store all
> snippets in individual *.R files and read them into to variables within
> the PHP scripts, from where they will be highlighted and formatted for
> display.
> 
> It would be reasonably easy to write an R script to source all *.R files
> in a directory to look for errors and problems. And having them all as
> separate files means I can still use Emacs/ESS to prepare, format, and
> run the code through R, which is my preferred environment.
> 
> All the best,
> 
> G
> 
>> On 1/6/07, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
>>> On 1/6/2007 9:25 AM, Gavin Simpson wrote:
>>>> On Sat, 2007-01-06 at 13:48 +0000, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>>>>> Could you tell us what you mean by
>>>> Thank you for your reply, Prof. Ripley.
>>>>
>>>>> - 'function'  (if() and + are functions in R, so do you want those?)
>>>> I was thinking about functions that are used like this: foo()
>>>> So I don't need things like "names<-". I don't need functions like +. -,
>>>> $, as I can highlight the separately if desired, though I'm not doing
>>>> this at the moment.
>>>>
>>>> Functions like for() while(), if() function() are handled separately.
>>>>
>>>>> - 'a base R installation'?   What is 'base R' (standard + recommended
>>>>> packages?)  And on what platform: the list is platform-specific?
>>>> Yes, I mean standard + recommended packages. As for platform, most of my
>>>> intended audience will be MS Windows users, though I am using Linux
>>>> (Fedora) to generate this list (i.e. my R installation is on Linux).
>>> Be careful:  the installed list of functions differs slightly from
>>> platform to platform.  For example, on Windows there's a function
>>> choose.dir in the utils package, but I don't think this exists on Unix.
>>>
>>> The list also varies from version to version, so if you could manage to
>>> run some code in the user's installed R to generate the list on the fly,
>>> you'd get the most accurate list.
>>>
>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>
>>>>> Here is a reasonable shot:
>>>>>
>>>>> findfuns <- function(x) {
>>>>>      if(require(x, character.only=TRUE)) {
>>>>>         env <- paste("package", x, sep=":")
>>>>>         nm <- ls(env, all=TRUE)
>>>>>         nm[unlist(lapply(nm, function(n) exists(n, where=env,
>>>>>                                                mode="function",
>>>>>                                                inherits=FALSE)))]
>>>>>      } else character(0)
>>>>> }
>>>>> pkgs <- dir(.Library)
>>>>> z <-  lapply(pkgs, findfuns)
>>>>> names(z) <- pkgs
>>>> Excellent, that works just fine for me. I can edit out certain packages
>>>> that I don't expect to use, before formatting as desired. I can also use
>>>> this function on a library of packages that I use regularly and will be
>>>> using in the web pages.
>>>>
>>>>> I don't understand your desired format, but
>>>>>
>>>>> write(sQuote(sort(unique(unlist(z)))), "")
>>>> I wanted a single string "...", with entries enclosed in "''" and
>>>> separated by "," (this is to go in a PHP array). I can generate such a
>>>> string from your z, above, as follows:
>>>>
>>>> paste(sQuote(sort(unique(unlist(z)), decreasing = TRUE)),
>>>>       collapse = ", ")
>>>>
>>>>> gives a single-column quoted list.  It does include internal functions,
>>>>> operators, S3 methods ... so you probably want to edit it.
>>>> Once again, thank you.
>>>>
>>>> All the best
>>>>
>>>> Gav
>>>>
>>>>> On Sat, 6 Jan 2007, Gavin Simpson wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Dear List,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I'm building an R syntax highlighting file for GeSHi [*] for a website I
>>>>>> am currently putting together. The syntax file needs a list of keywords
>>>>>> to highlight. How can I generate a list of all the functions in a base R
>>>>>> installation?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Ideally the list would be formatted like this:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> "'fun1', 'fun2', 'fun3'"
>>>>>>
>>>>>> when printed to the screen so I can copy and paste it into the syntax
>>>>>> file.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I'm sure this has been asked before, but I stupidly didn't save that
>>>>>> email and I couldn't come up with a suitable query parameter for
>>>>>> Jonathan Baron's search site to return results before timing out.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Thanks in advance,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Gav
>>>>>>
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>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

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